Crazy Alice, a half-ton bison, likes to feast on grass and roll in the dirt, but her deepest attachment might be to a certain corner of the Montana prairie — when her handlers once moved her herd to a different pasture, she tried to break out and go back.
Now, the Trump administration wants to evict Crazy Alice and hundreds of other bison from that home on the range, and replace them with cattle. The resulting clash on the prairie has pitted ranchers and Republican leaders against a furry, snorting symbol of the American West.
“This is a part of our country’s heritage,” said Alison Fox, executive director of American Prairie, a deep-pocketed nonprofit that has spent two decades buying ranches and grazing leases on public land in northern Montana to create the newly embattled home for bison.
The conflict centers on 900 bison owned by the group, which was allowed by multiple administrations, including President Trump’s first, to graze on federal lands, much to the consternation of politically conservative ranchers who wanted the land for cattle.
This winter, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management reversed course and canceled the bison grazing permits. Citing the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, the agency said the federal grasslands where the animals grazed should go to livestock being raised for food, not bison largely enjoying their right to roam. The agency deemed the bison to be wildlife, not production livestock.
Conservation groups condemned the decision, as did Native American tribes, who say the anti-bison effort threatens their own herds as they try to revive bison populations that were hunted to near extinction by 19th-century settlers.
But Montana ranchers like Perri Jacobs celebrated. She said the federal government, a perennial boogeyman for Western conservatives, finally seemed to be on her side.
“These lands are here for food,” said Ms. Jacobs, whose family has raised cows in northern Montana for nearly 110 years. “We have to understand that progress and time march forward. Bison just don’t fit on the landscape anymore.”
Ranchers like Ms. Jacobs could give the Trump administration some sorely needed support in farm country, where Democrats and independents are trying to capitalize on anger over tariffs and the cost of diesel and fertilizer to flip Republican seats in this year’s midterm elections. Phillips County, where the beef over bison centers, is in Montana’s Second Congressional District, a Republican-held seat not on any forecaster’s battlefield map. In the western part of the state, though, Montana’s First District could very much be in play.
And the bison fight fits squarely in a larger war over the West, as the Trump administration pushes to open more public land to oil drilling, mining and logging.
Pro-bison environmental groups accused the Trump administration of bowing to pressure from Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana and ranching groups that had pressed the administration to rule against bison grazing.
“I don’t think it’s actually about the bison,” said Ryan Busse, a Democrat running in a primary in Montana’s First District. “Gianforte is fine with oil companies doing whatever the hell they want on public lands. But some bison walking around and eating grass is a threat?”
The state’s powerful land board — which includes Mr. Gianforte and other high-ranking Republican elected officials — is also taking steps toward kicking bison off Montana state trust lands.
“We must ensure that public lands remain accessible and productive, rather than being locked away for the vision of special interests,” Mr. Gianforte said after the federal permits were canceled.
American Prairie argues that cows and bison can coexist, and is trying to undo the Bureau of Land Management’s decision. The bureau, it said, scrapped decades of successful land policies by arbitrarily redefining what constitutes “livestock” in the American West.
If the final decision goes into effect — potentially later this spring — American Prairie says it will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to alter fence lines and haul bison away from lands where they belong.
That argument falls flat with many ranchers along the rolling plains of Phillips County, which is larger than Connecticut and stretches south from the Canadian border to the Missouri River Breaks. Signs along cattle gates and wire fences declare, “Save the Cowboy, Stop American Prairie.”
The enmity began when American Prairie began buying ranch land and the accompanying grazing leases more than 20 years ago, with the aim of building one of the largest nature reserves in the country. Its property and grazing lands have grown to about double the size of Los Angeles.
The resentment has sharpened since the Covid-19 pandemic, as wealthy out-of-staters drove up land prices with dreams of snagging their slice of a state that’s been called “The Last Best Place.” Phillips County may lie a world apart from the ski chalets of Big Sky or the mansions on Flathead Lake to the west, but even there ranches now sell for $1 million or more, beyond the reach of locals in a county where the median household income is $53,000 a year.
American Prairie has far more buying power. The group took in more than $43 million in contributions in 2024, according to its tax returns, and its board is stocked with corporate executives and investors, including Jacqueline Badger Mars of the Mars candy fortune. It valued its total assets at nearly $207 million.
The group says it tries to be a good neighbor. Its bison are tagged and vaccinated, and kept behind well-maintained electrified fences to keep them from traipsing into cattle fields. It leases land not occupied by bison to local cattle ranchers, and has opened up public access through much of its land. It sends live bison to help tribes expand and diversify their herds, and donates meat to local food pantries.
“We’re following all the rules,” Ms. Fox said.
One sunny spring morning, Scott Heidebrink, American Prairie’s director of landscape stewardship, a bison skull tattoo on his right arm, bumped in his truck along dirt paths where herds of bison were grazing. Meadowlarks flitted through the grass, and female bison had just begun to give birth to the year’s calves.
“By any definition, those animals are livestock,” he said, pointing to a cluster who clomped away at the sound of his pickup.
Usually, conservative ranchers and farmers are the ones who gripe about federal meddling. But Mr. Heidebrink said the land bureau’s decision showed that under Mr. Trump, big government was now coming for them.
“They don’t go to our neighbors and say, ‘What are you going to do with that cow?’” he said.
On the edges of American Prairie’s holdings, Kendall Koss, 26, was torn about the bison’s presence on land his family has ranched for more than a century.
He leases some land from American Prairie for his cows and said he got along with the group’s local workers. But he resented outsiders who have driven up the price of Montana land, making it nearly impossible for a young rancher like him to grow his own operation.
With beef prices soaring and cattle populations near record lows, Mr. Koss said it had never been more important to put America’s prairies to work feeding people.
“I have nothing against the buffalo,” he said. “They’re a cool animal. I just don’t agree with what they’re doing.”
Source:
www.nytimes.com
